Pioneering study reveals a detailed view of Alaska police officers’ use of deadly force

A first-of-its-kind study examining Alaska law enforcement’s use of deadly force found that two-thirds of potentially lethal encounters between police and citizens involved a person showing signs of mental illness, among other findings.

The Alaska Justice Information Center released the study, the first comprehensive academic look at law enforcement use of force in the state, on Friday.

“We’ve done the analysis and written this up as a way to increase transparency in the state and to give some information that policymakers can use to make decisions,” said Troy Payne, an associate professor, head of the Alaska Justice Information Center at the University of Alaska Anchorage and one of the study’s lead authors.

The study, which examined nearly a hundred incidents between 2010 and 2020, found that 55 people were killed by Alaska law enforcement officers. None of the 295 officers who used force in those incidents were criminally charged, according to the study.

The Anchorage Police Department’s new acting chief, Ken McCoy, called the report “vital information” and said the agency is reviewing the study and its recommendations about data collection.

“It’s imperative we continue having the difficult conversations and taking the necessary actions to improve policing,” McCoy said in a statement Monday.

[Anchorage’s acting police chief aims to improve community trust, add diversity training]

The research started in spring 2020, just before the filmed murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer launched a nationwide wave of protest and increased scrutiny of police violence.

“We started this more than a year ago, not in response to a specific incident,” Payne said. “We weren’t sure what information the state had about these incidents. We wanted to go looking.”

In Alaska, there is no centralized collection of data on police use of force. So Payne and a small team of researchers had to improvise by obtaining case files from the Office of Special Prosecutions, a branch of the state Department of Law that’s responsible for determining whether police officers should be charged with a crime when they kill or seriously hurt someone.

The researchers asked for all incidents where police used some kind of deadly force — almost always a firearm — including those in which the subject was killed, injured but not killed, or not injured at all.

They found 92 incidents involving 100 total citizens and 295 officers between 2010 and 2020.

Fifty-five people were killed. Twenty-six were seriously injured. Nineteen were the targets of deadly force but sustained minor injuries or no injuries at all.

No police officers were killed during the examined encounters. (Six Alaska law enforcement officers have been killed in the line of duty since 2010, according to the Officer Down Memorial organization, but their deaths were not part of the data, which was restricted to cases investigated by the Office of Special Prosecutions.) Three percent of those who were injured sustained serious injuries, and 14% sustained minor injuries. Two police dogs were killed.

Major findings in the study include:

• Indigenous and Black Alaskans were disproportionately the subjects of officers’ lethal use of force. Alaska Native and American Indian people made up 27% of the people officers used lethal force on. Black Alaskans made up 6%. “American Indians or Alaska Natives and Blacks were involved as citizens in officer use of lethal force nearly double their overall representation in Alaska’s population,” the study found. White, Asian American and Pacific Islander people were underrepresented.

• More than two-thirds of cases involved a person who showed signs of mental illness, a finding Payne calls one of the most significant of the study. A third expressed some suicidal intent during the encounter.

• More than two-thirds of the cases involved a person who was intoxicated, with alcohol, marijuana and methamphetamine coming up most often.

• The agencies most often involved in deadly use-of-force incidents were the Alaska State Troopers and Anchorage Police Department, with 43 and 28 incidents respectively.

• On average, Alaska police used lethal force 8.8 times per year between 2010 and 2020.

• About 41% of incidents started with police investigating a violent crime. Some 16% of incidents started with a traffic stop.

Last summer, after the Floyd killing elevated the conversation about police force, the Daily News also analyzed Office of Special Prosecutions letters, documenting fatal police encounters from 2015 to 2020 and reaching similar conclusions about the prevalence of mental health episodes and racial disparities in police violence.

The information culled from case files didn’t always answer all the questions, and varied widely, because the Office of Special Prosecutions reports were meant to answer a question about the legality of the act, not to gather demographic data for research, Payne said.

“There is a real need for the state of Alaska to have some standard data collection,” Payne said.

The FBI is now collecting data on police use of force nationally, but there is no mandate for Alaska agencies to share their information, Payne said.

The Alaska Department of Public Safety collects and publishes its own use-of-force data for the Alaska State Troopers, including non-lethal force. It does not track or collect use-of-force data for other agencies around the state, said spokesman Tim DeSpain. The agency has been “voluntarily participating” in the FBI national use-of-force data collection since May 2020.

“This will ... provide greater clarity into the data surrounding use of force incidents nationwide, something that law enforcement leaders and Americans have requested for years,” DeSpain wrote.

The study recommended that the state should start gathering standardized data on police use of force “housed at an agency that can compile and use the information to drive policy.”

Payne said he and his researchers spent months steeped in files that often included autopsy photos and interviews.

“You can’t forget there are real people behind every single one of these incidents,” he said.